LONE ELK

           I see the lone elk standing so still, so tall just beyond a ridge underneath

the slender crescent moon. A silvery patina coats his tan shoulders as my breath

is taken from me in this moment of first recognition. He’s looking out over the sprawl of Los Angeles as if he owns the city and is orchestrating the welter of activity, where in his penetrating gaze, the whole chaotic cacophony somehow makes sense. It’s as if this moonlight in which he bathes offers a portal into the other-worldly human realm for which he has no words yet feels in his sinews

and in his sturdy loins the power, the yearning, the confused inchoate hoping

of this strange human race.

             

             Elk knows that the moon he was born under more than three decades ago on that other ridge overlooking the blue shining water that never stops continues to river and quiver through his life even now where everything he hears, smells, sees and tastes is simply felt as ease-filled truth guiding him always.

              

              From these lunar understandings, Elk’s animal wisdom and felt sense of kindness emerging from these two rocky ridges, somehow the scurrying creatures below, these people, are slowly, very very slowly, beginning to remember their own subtle ways of knowing..of being, of loving, of becoming animal under the moons from which they were born.

              And Elk, shimmering serenity and standing at ease, lifts his beautiful head once more to see and to savor the crescent glowing above.